this war against your faith in me
by Nokomiss
Summary: When she decided that the best way to make a clean break was to rip apart the hearts of those who loved her most, she hesitated. Complete.


this war against your faith in me

Notes: For Rainpuddle. Title taken from My Chemical Romance's "You Know What They Do To Guys Like Us in Prison."

* * *

When she decided that the best way to make a clean break was to rip apart the hearts of those who loved her most, she hesitated.

Until now, everything she had done was easily covered, concealed, hidden from the prying eyes of her family. They were completely ignorant that she was different from them, that she believed differently from them, that she thought the insidious beliefs of the enemy, those wrong, depraved ideas, might hold a grain of truth.

She might have broken away before now, but she couldn't have borne the looks in her parent's eyes.

They believed in love, her parents. They were loving and loved and lovers. They embodied the purest aspects of the feeling and the darkest aspects of the feeling and appeared to everyone as a simple, happy couple. They had always told her that love was the most important thing in the world.

She was in love, in love with a boy whose beliefs had infected her soul like a plague, rotting away her childhood faith until it oozed out her every pore, leaving her feeling empty and wicked and honest and whole, all at the same time.

"Your parents know nothing of the world," she was told by her lover. "They're wrong."

And she believed him, until thoughts of pure and dirty blood, mixed and diluted children swirled through her brain, settling in new places. The pure and the impure, the knowledgeable and the ignorant, all became one. What her parents told her, what her lover told her, what was implied at school and what was explicit at home were no longer such.

She had never imagined herself as nothing but a shade of gray, but here she stood, hair stark against white skin and eyes burning out of her determined, flawed face, proudly walking away from everything she had ever known and everything that she would have believed if he hadn't stumbled fully into her life. If she hadn't let him into her life. If she hadn't let him into her heart.

Her heart which was breaking because she loved her mother and she loved her father and soon, soon they wouldn't love her. Soon she would be the betrayer, the child they carefully didn't mention around company or in the quiet comfort of their home. The child who didn't send presents on holidays and who would be shamed into sending gifts receive back, unopened, to cast a pall of sadness and regret over days that had been the brightest, the most brilliant during her childhood.

Soon, all she would be able to rely on was her lover. His love and his company would be the whole of her world, as she traversed the distrusting paths of new alliances with the enemy. They weren't the enemy anymore, not really, but she couldn't ignore the thought of her people lying dead at the hands of them, and couldn't think of them as friends.

A sick feeling settled within her as she thought of them as her allies. Her companions. Her acquaintances. They'd never let her speak to the people she was close to now, to her friends and family and associates. Her lifetime of memories, her lifetime of connections, would be erased.

If she so much as owled her mother, if she so much as saw her best friend in Hogsmeade, she would be considered a traitor and thrown to the wolves. If she were to betray her family for her love, she would have to do so fully or else she would damn herself.

When they were apart, sometimes she thought she could live without her lover. He couldn't be her world, not completely. But as soon as he walked into a room, as soon as she caught a glimpse of him she knew that she had to stay with her decision. She couldn't bear the thought of the rest of her days spent apart from his smile, his bright eyes. She thought of her life spent cursing his family and mocking their lifestyle and being enemies.

She knew his family wouldn't accept her. She knew that she stood opposed to everything they believed, that her past would make it hard for them to ever embrace her fully.

She knew that life would be hard. Her life would never be the same, after she took this final, heart-wrenching step.

But Pansy couldn't imagine life without Ron, not after everything they'd gone through together, and, with a deep breath, stepped forward to sever her ties and begin her life anew.


End file.
